Chatbot vs live chat. What is the optimal choice?

3 August 2023

Chat has become the most commonly used communication channel for both business and personal use. Customers expect immediate responses, and the introduction of live chat and chatbots brings them closer to quick issue resolution. Additionally, AI technologies have changed the way corporations interact with buyers. With the emergence of chatbots, companies gain innovative ways to build strong relationships with their audience. It seems evident, therefore, that more and more brands will manage customer relationships without human interactions.

Chatbot vs live chat – what to choose?

So, if a company has a choice: chatbot vs live chat – what can it choose to ensure excellent customer experience? Both communication channels create unique experiences for users. Many chatbots for customers provide quick responses, eliminating the need for customers to wait for email replies or use the phone. On the other hand, live chat excels at handling complex issues that require explanations and adds empathy to conversations.

When it comes to offering chat on your website, you have two options: live chat, which involves users talking to a sales or service representative directly, or a chatbot, where customers interact with software that offers responses based on a pre-written script or flow triggered by keywords or intent.

Chatbots have evolved, so that now an AI-powered chatbot uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand and analyze conversations with people and tailor their responses based on predefined answers, an educational database, or previous customer interactions. These applications can even handle transactions.

Therefore, it seems that both technologies work together to develop high-quality customer experience. In this article, we analyze the advantages of live chat and chatbots and why considering both can meet the needs of users.

What is live chat?

Live chat is a digital communication channel that enables businesses to interact with buyers in real-time through messages. With a live chat widget implemented on the website, visitors can easily reach out to your company and get answers to their inquiries. Live chat can also be offered via messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Apple Business Chat.

It is an integral part of an effective support toolkit that ensures the highest customer satisfaction compared to email and phone communication. There are many benefits of live chat that you can leverage to improve key support metrics, such as first response time or average resolution time. Many consumers prefer live chatting and are more inclined to return to the website for future purchases.

Main reasons for choosing live chat

Nowadays, especially with the rapid growth in the e-commerce industry in recent years, many buyers and information seekers, particularly the younger generation but also individuals aged 30-40, have shifted from physical points of contact for information to online platforms, including live chat.

Online responses are expected instantly – here and now, in real-time. The increasing dynamics and a growing number of potential customers demanding quick interaction have necessitated increased employment in this area and raised expectations for agents’ response times. Human agents need to work around the clock to offer 24/7 support.

Live chat excels at handling complex conversations. Certain questions require elaboration and discussion. By interacting with a live agent, complex issues can be smoothly resolved through effective questioning.

Live chat enables multitasking. It helps boost team efficiency by allowing consultants to handle multiple conversations simultaneously. You can identify complex live chats and direct them to the appropriate team for faster support. However, agents can handle a maximum of 2 to 6 concurrent conversations at once.

Conversations are conducted by people who understand their customers’ emotions. Consultants can react flexibly, engage in intelligent dialogue, and thereby gain the consumer’s trust. Live chat conversations are entirely handled by humans, regardless of the size of the problem.

Assisting in optimizing the number of employed advisors, training time for new employees, or their response time is the chatbot – a virtual consultant that can be utilized in customer interactions similarly to live chat.

Chatbot definition

A chatbot is a tool that enables free communication with customers on a website through personalized responses without the involvement of a human as the person writing to the consumer. It is an interface that mimics human interactions. In this case, the team’s work revolves more around the development of the chatbot, adding new content, optimizing its responses, rather than engaging in direct conversations.

Chatbots are often programmed in terms of machine learning, where it analyzes data received from the user and matches responses based on previously collected and configured interactions.

In such cases, it can use dependency solutions, meaning that if the user enters a specific word or sentence, a predefined response is provided. There are two types of chatbots. A chatbot can react to specific keywords exactly as expected, where even a typo can prevent the phrase from being matched. On the other hand, it can also be more flexible and not focus on exact word-to-word matches but rather on contextual alignment with what was defined earlier.

Chatbot – what are the benefits it provides?

Before we delve into where it can be used and how its implementation looks, let’s take a closer look at several benefits that come from this tool.

Let’s start with the first aspect – the number of conversations handled simultaneously. While a human assistant can handle, depending on the complexity of projects, topics, their experience, and knowledge, around 2 to 6 live chats simultaneously, chatbots are frequently used in order to handle hundreds of them at the same time. This significantly improves the service level coefficient, where during peak traffic, we avoid customers waiting for several, or even a dozen, minutes for an available agent. In this case, we achieve nearly a 100% service level and, at the same time, customer satisfaction with the time it takes to ask their first question. The benefit for a company with such a solution is that even with a small support team for the chatbot, it can conduct up to 100,000 conversations per month.

The second aspect, which can be equally important as part of the measured KPIs, is response time. The average response time for live chat agents can range from, for example, 15 seconds to even a minute or more. This will depend on the complexity of the question, the agent’s experience, and the number of live chats they are handling at the moment. The higher the number of live chats, the potentially higher the response time to the customer. Once again, the solution to improving response time is the chatbot. In this case, we actually create the response time ourselves. It can be set to an average of even 2 seconds if we choose to, and that time will be maintained. It doesn’t matter whether our chatbot is highly experienced or dealing with dozens of recipients at the moment. In any case, it should handle the response within the time we configured when creating it. No queue and a response in a very short time are definitely something that many users expect.

The chatbot is an automated tool that can always be available, and its responses are repeatable. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a regular Monday or New Year’s Eve night. In any case, we can expect the efficiency and availability of our chatbot to be the same. From the customer’s perspective, this allows them to receive a response at any time, while from the company’s perspective, it allows for greater flexibility in creating schedules for assistants. It is easy to locate a chatbot on your website, so that it is accessible to all customers.

One thing to pay attention to when starting to work with a chatbot is that it can greatly improve support service, for example, for an online store in the case of simple questions. However, it will never fully replace an advisor who can support the chatbot in more complex and demanding issues, as a chatbot is only a computer program that simulates a human.. The chatbots can also undoubtedly answer to repetitive questions, previously defined question groups, and the ability to connect to external systems where the chatbot can provide information about the order status or shipment status. However, in the event that it does not understand a question or it is too complex, the solution is to switch to a human advisor who can help with the issues that our bot couldn’t handle. To have an optimal chatbot, in addition to its regular training and case analysis, it is worth having a second line of agents who can assist, for example, when the robot does not understand a sentence or when a customer types “connect me to an assistant.”

Chatbot vs Live chat – What and when to choose?

Both live chat and chatbot are the main avenues used by companies to assist and engage customers. Both tools can work independently as well as complement each other effectively. In this section, we will describe when to choose between a chatbot and live chat and which one is more suitable for your business. How do they differ, and how will each of them help you achieve your business goals and provide a better level of service?

Response Time

When it comes to chatbots on your website or fan page, you can instantly start a conversation with every customer seeking support at the same time. Chatbot platforms help eliminate waiting time for a response to user queries.

In the case of live chat, customers would have to wait several minutes before connecting with the right agent. The waiting time for live chat can be minimized if the team is well-equipped and adequately staffed. With ready-made responses and access to chat scripts, your agents can provide immediate support through live chat. This way, a company may program chatbots to answer simple questions only.

If you have a small support team and notice an increase in the number of inquiries, a chatbot can reduce the workload and direct only complex issues to the team.

Implementation Time and User-Friendliness

Live chat and chatbot software in a Software-as-a-Service model do not require coding and can be launched within minutes. Training is required to familiarize your support staff with how to work with live chat or chatbots. Both tools can be integrated with a set of other useful tools such as CRM, helpdesk software, calendar, etc. If you don’t have time for implementation and training, consider outsourcing services, provided by company like CCIG.

Handling Complex Issues

When it comes to resolving complex issues, live chat is the clear winner. Regardless of how complex the problem is, humans can handle it. Consultants can collaborate with other teams and discuss with customers to provide the best solution.

On the other hand, a chatbot is trained to respond to a specific set of keywords. If a user reports a complex problem that the chatbot is not trained for, it will redirect to live chat with a human consultant to resolve it. Although chatbots are commonly equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), they are not yet ready to handle complex user queries.

If your company mainly deals with technical and repetitive issues (e.g., tracking a shipment or using a ticket system feature) that apply to all your customers, a chatbot will be the right option to handle those messages.

If your business deals with complex issues that require personal attention or an individual approach, live chat is the best solution.

24/7 Support

Offering 24/7 support is a fundamental capability of chatbots. Modern chatbots operate continuously without downtime. As an automated service, they offer customers consistent and immediate responses. If you receive a large number of routine inquiries overnight, a chatbot service would be the best solution.

While live chat can also be available 24/7, it would require your agents to work around the clock. However, this means that customers will be able to receive personalized support at any time of the day. If you have a small number of inquiries that require extensive human intervention, a rotating schedule for live chat agents is a good approach.

To handle a large number of inquiries requiring human intervention, consider contact center outsourcing services form company like CCIG. lIt’s the largest call center company in Poland with multiple locations and a multilingual skilled workforce.

Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

A live agent can understand the mood and tone of the conversation partner. This allows for constructive communication and the delivery of required support, increasing overall customer engagement. Establishing the right level of contact and making a good first impression enhances customer satisfaction and, consequently, builds their loyalty to the brand.

Immediate responses from chatbots improve buyer satisfaction. Moreover, new services are emerging, such as AI chatbots being capable of initiating small talk and engaging with buyers. This makes conversations sound less automated and more engaging.

Cost-effectiveness

One chatbot can replace an entire support team. Additionally, implementing chatbot technology means no expenses for infrastructure or salaries, which would be incurred for live chat. Chatbots are best suited for companies looking to scale quickly and dealing with a large volume of incoming inquiries.

For small businesses where the number of live chat connections is limited, live chat is the best solution as it directly connects, for example, with business owners.

Personalized Responses

Live chat operated by human agents is the clear winner when it comes to personalized responses. A human agent on the other side of the communicator can not only retrieve customer data at any moment and offer personalized messages to each customer but can also engage in human conversations with consumers and empathize in a very genuine way.

On the other hand, AI-based chatbots store data of the people they interact with, provide contextual support, and send proactive messages to recipients. They offer intent-based solutions, create marketing communications to encourage interested parties to make a purchase or help with any issues.

However, the best solution is a combination of both, where customers can receive responses tailored to their previous interactions from bots, but they can also be redirected to live agents if required to continue the conversation.

Scalability

You can prepare for sales peaks based on historical peak hours. However, you may not know when the volume of traffic will increase due to outages or mentions of your business in mass media. In such cases, relying solely on live chat will require your company to take costly actions to meet the response time, for example, hiring more consultants in a short period, training candidates, and bearing infrastructure and salary costs.

By implementing a chatbot, you can overcome these challenges without compromising results and ensuring sales growth. With bots, you can easily scale your conversations and provide instant solutions to users. It improves your business productivity without significant costs and resources, assuming that customer issues are easy to resolve.

If you want to be fully prepared for a rapid increase in business scale, check out our customer service outsourcing service at CCIG. We have a multi-station contact center with several locations in the country and abroad.

Employee Performance

Although live chat enhances agent productivity compared to traditional support channels, such as phone calls, chatbots outperform live chat in this regard. They can completely handle the log of routine and frequent questions, allowing agents to focus on complex issues and resolve them more effectively.

On the other hand, live chat increases agent productivity compared to other traditional support paths. It provides all the information about the person they are talking to and integrations on a single screen. With rules, the system can automatically assign conversations to the appropriate agent based on their skills, knowledge, and workload. This prevents overburdening a single agent and manual assignment of conversations.

Live chat can also be equipped with automation features, including ready-made responses, allowing agents to search from a list of predefined responses and resolve user issues rapidly without typing them each time.

How do live chat and chatbots complement each other?

Availability 24/7

Having a chatbot integrated with live chat software allows you to offer support beyond working hours. If any complex problem arises, chatbots can gather information and pass it on to agents on the next shift to resolve it. This is one of many benefits of chatbots.

Instant Responses

Chatbots can help shorten waiting time and facilitate resolving typical questions. Live chat agents can focus on complex issues and work on reducing resolution time. Depending on a type, it is possible to answer to simple questions.

Engage Visitors

You can send targeted, proactive messages and initiate conversations with visitors to your website, increasing marketing efficiency. Chatbots can then take over the conversation if the visitor engages with the proactive message. These pieces of information can be passed on to agents for further handling.

Multilingual Support

Live chat and chatbots break all language barriers and help provide support to customers in their preferred language. With live translation, you can instantly translate your texts in English into any of the 33 selected languages.

Expanding into foreign markets? Looking for consistent quality customer service in different countries? Check out our multilingual customer support.

Key Takeaways from this Comparison

Chatbots and live chat provide unique benefits. From instant responses and 24/7 availability found in chatbots to the invaluable human interactions provided by live chat. Each fulfills different customer needs.

Depending on your business, as well as your needs and preferences, choose what suits you best.

For example, in e-commerce, live chat can assign and increase conversions. The quick personal interaction can dispel minor doubts. In tools with many repetitive questions and standardized actions, an advanced AI chatbot may be the best solution. AI and data storing has evolved so much over the years, therefore predictive chatbots are not an unusual tool anymore. Chatbots process the data quicker than any human.

Each recurring task is an ideal scenario for implementing a chatbot, and any complex questions require human support. Live chat is a better communication channel for companies dealing with complex support queries. Complex issues can be handled with personalized explanations. Implementing chatbots in such companies may negatively impact customer satisfaction, so it is essential to measure satisfaction metrics.

The best approach is to use both chatbot and live chat to ensure excellent customer support. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of chatbots and live chat will provide better insights into which solution is ideal for your company. You can identify different customer interactions and categorize them, whether they are suitable for bot usage or need to be handled by live agents.

Take the best of both worlds. At CCIG, we use both chatbot and live chat technologies in the right balance, ensuring the best support for your customers. Explore our services!